foreign affairs by alison lurie (1984)

As I walked by myself
And talked to myself,
Myself said unto me,
Look to thyself,
Take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee.
- Old Song


Virginia Miner, American, 54 years old, plain, divorced Ivy League college professor, and an expert in the field of children’s literature, is in London with 27 year-old Fred Turner, who is tall, dark, endowed with movie-star looks, and an associate professor in the same university. Miner is on a six-month grant and will be continuing her studies on folk rhymes of schoolchildren; Turner, on the other hand, will be writing a book on the 18th century author John Gay. Miner is a devout anglophile while Turner’s dislike of London is growing keener by the day. The two will have separate experiences which they least expect and which will prove once again the democratic character of love – it knows no age, status, nationality, nor how one measures up in the Richter scale of looks or in today’s parlance, “hotness”.

A character who manages to steal the thunder from the lead players in the book is the dog Fido, who is visible only to the imagination of Miner. She visualizes him as a “medium sized dirty-white long-haired mutt, mainly Welsh terrier: sometimes trailing her silently, at other times whining and panting and nipping her heels; when bolder, dashing round in circles trying to trip her up, or at least get her to stoop down so that me may rush at her, knock her to the ground and cover her with sloppy kisses.”

In one of those days when Miner was feeling under the weather, Fido, thumps his feathery tail on the comforter but she shoves him away. “Though she has a perfect right to be sorry for herself now, she knows how perilous it is to overindulge it. To go on feeding and petting Fido, even to acknowledge his existence too often, will fatally encourage him. He will begin to grow larger, swelling from the breadth and height of a beagle to that of a retriever – a sheepdog – a Saint Bernard. If she doesn’t watch out, one day, she will be followed everywhere by an invisible dirty white dog the size of a cow.”

One of the best metaphors I have come across.